Guernica, the “magazine of art and politics” has lately featured, in a surprisingly synergistic manner,  many topics I muse about and folks I “know” from Sepia Mutiny and other diasporic blogs.

In I Don“t Want To Fight, V.V. Ganeshananthan (aka Vasugi, Sepia Mutiny contributor extraordinaire) and Amitava Kumar discuss what makes a South Asian book and whether such a creature will forever serve up the same old themes of “at least three of the following: a large family or two, arranged marriage, misery, some violence, Bollywood, the interior design of nostalgia which uses the furniture of loss.”

I laughed out loud when I read this. Not so much at its apt round-up of South Asian literary devices, but at the fact that that is a large chunk of my life, minus the arranged marriage.  Oh my god, my life is a book! An open one, even.  Chew on it some more and you realize this is how much of the world lives, has lived, even in Northern Asia, South America, Africa and parts of the United States and Europe.  And now, after 9/11, our subsequent wars abroad and Katrina & The Flood, Americans are catching that general conflict-ridden bug.   That hum which varies greatly in amplitude and frequency given the situation but never goes away.  Vasugi on fiction, politics and people:

… All fiction is political in some way, and it’s interesting to see fiction play out in some South Asian spheres in which talking about politics has become dirty, something polite people don’t do. And of course fiction does all sorts of things, goes all sorts of places, that polite people don’t go. So I was fascinated to ask some terrific fiction writers about politics and war and see what would rise to the surface, what would bubble up, and what would stay in the background.

And some things also stay in the background because in parts of South Asia and its diasporas, war and a kind of unstable politics have been normalized. I am always fascinated to watch characters dealing with their personal lives without explicitly acknowledging the hold politics has on them, even as it affects everything they do. Have they become desensitized? And how does one write about violence without fetishizing it?

In many ways, we are the same and identify with the same.  Yet, new stories continue to emerge from that same, so is the novelty in the subtle twists and each extremely individual experience?  Is X’s arranged marriage different from Y’s?  Is one story of loss in wartime different from another overall?  Is my mom’s experience in the Kuwait of August 1990 different from that of Kathy Zeitoun’s in the New Orleans of August 2005?  I would argue not.  It is dangerous, however, to draw the same conclusions of good guy vs. bad guy and winner vs. loser from stories that are strikingly similar in their motifs.  Stereotypes do not always determine motivation and outcome.

As the world gets smaller, we turn to generalization and compartments to make things easier on us.  We like to say, “I’ve seen this before” and extend those comfortable parallels, and then vote and create foreign policy from our decisions.  This month’s Guernica also carries a wonderful piece by Sadanand Dhume called The Colonized Mind.  Dhume comments on his piece over at True/Slant:

In this essay for Guernica I examine the ongoing Arabization of Indonesian Islam through a visit to the Dieng plateau in central Java, home to the oldest Hindu temples on the island. It’s a snapshot of a civilization in transition, a place caught between an Indic past and an Arabized future. It has nothing to do with terrorism, or for that matter with textbook radical Islam, the drive to order every aspect of society and the state according to sharia law. Yet, I can’t help but feel that twenty years from now, when we look back on Indonesia, it is this moment of cultural change that will be seen as more important than the much more narrowly focused war against the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah.

This is all so much larger and more subtle than we immediately perceive.  Who knows what will eventually rise to the surface, and what will stay down?  More importantly, how could it not give us new stories?

In related news, Vasugi’s Love Marriage just showed up at my doorstep.  (Look, my reading list is two years long as it is.)  Will report back with my take on it.

If you don’t know already from some of my VizWorld posts, I’m a Flowing Data fangirl. Nathan Yau is the younger, hipper, nerdier Edward Tufte, and one who likes to share his sources and techniques. Understandably, Tufte has his trade secrets, but it was like pulling teeth to get him to share what tools and design methods he uses to make his graphics.  Something about Adobe Illustrator and a cadre of assistants is all I got.

Last night, I made a 2009 United States county-specific unemployment map using Flowing Data’s How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools tutorial.  All you need is a Python installation, the BeautifulSoup XML parser, a good text editor and some patience to debug.  (Another reason I like Nathan: He codes in Python, the best, most intuitive programming language out there!)

These are the results, admittedly without a legend (bad Maitri!), which I will work on in Photoshop.  So you know what you’re looking at here, the lightest color is 0% unemployment and steps up from there in 2% increments, with the darkest color denoting 10+% unemployment.  This data was downloaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

1. The Flowing Data original reproduced:

2. Diverging colors (blue=low; red=high)

3. Sequential colors (white=low; orange=high; black=+10%).  The darker the hues, the more trouble folks have telling them apart.  Black shows the worst hit spots and provides a backdrop with which to differentiate between the other colors

Check out the original Unemployment, 2004 To Present to see how bad things have become just in the last two years. This isn’t news, but just as well when you look at it in a county-by-county color graphic.  The nation is indeed bleeding.  Let’s make more casinos at home and start more land wars in Asia!

In other words, get our little and big kids learning.  What are we waiting for?  An economic depression in which the most creative thing we can come up with is spending money on bread and circuses, casinos, and throwback jerseys?  Wait.

TechDailyDose | Top Scientists Urge Access To Research

A group of Nobel Prize-winning scientists are urging Congress to pass legislation that would provide the public with free online access to federally funded research. In a letter to members of Congress sent earlier this week, 41 Nobel Prize-winning scientists in medicine, physics, and chemistry called on lawmakers to pass the Federal Research Public Access Act, offered by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas., which would require online public access to the published results of research funded through 11 U.S. agencies and departments. Peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from publicly funded research also would have to be made available online within six months of publication, under the bill.

“For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible,” wrote the scientists, who are part of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access coalition. “Yet, too often, research results are not available to researchers, scientists, or members of the public.” The bill has been referred to Lieberman’s committee, but the panel has yet to act on the measure.

The federal government funds over $60 billion in research annually.  I can’t find my own theses online, but Elsevier will sell you my journal paper for a hefty fee.  Taxpayers paid for all of that research.  It’s not enough to pass such an act, though.  Information access requires a decent human interface, extremely intelligent search capabilities and expert database maintenance.   “Immediately available” – I do not think this phrase means what you think it means.

Looks like yesterday’s post titled links for 2009-11-05 posted and reposted itself a dozen times overnight, eventually turning into links for 2009-11-06. I use the Blog Autoposting Tool (Beta) on del.icio.us which “creates a daily post of your latest bookmarks to your blog.” I wonder whether it went nuts or my WordPress install is on the fritz.

So, I’ve killed the blog posting job and the offending post itself, and will post links manually from now on. If this post does not regurgitate and spew like the last one did, it’s a del.icio.us thing. Otherwise, it’s a WordPress fail.  The last thing I need right now is pushing around WordPress innards.

Are you sure you want to learn how to blog? This sh*t be overrated, y’all.

UPDATE: It was totally del.icio.us’s fault. That’s what you get for relying on Beta.